What AI Is Not

There is a common perception among people about what Artificial Intelligence is going to look like.

If you are optimist, it will look like this:

Sonny from iRobot (H/T Digital Domain)

If you are a pessimist it will look like this:

T600 Terminator (H/T scriptflags.com)

Yikes.

As it turns out, both ideas are completely wrong. It is important to realize that AI is not a physical thing, it is a mental thing. Sure it resides in a computer but it doesn’t have to live in a robot body.

As humans it is easy to make this mistake. We are restricted to our bodies, and you can only find a human consciousness in one. AI will be different. A robot body will just be a tool to an AI. In fact it most likely will be able to inhabit multiple points of view simultaneously. For example, a sufficiently powerful AI should be able to run multiple robot bodies at the same time in order to collaborate on tasks. These are known as swarm robots.

All of the quadrotors are being controlled by a single computer.

So before we leave this topic of robots, let’s see what the state of the art is.